Computing devices, either working alone or linked together in a communication network, are becoming increasingly useful to their human users. In many areas, such as searching and information retrieval, computing devices have become so capable that they seem to be able to perform almost any task given to them. The use of this enormous capability is, however, often stymied by the inefficiency of the means available to present a task to the computing device. That is to say, the user interface for specifying a task is often a chief bottleneck for getting a computing device to perform that task.
The occasion sometimes arises where a user wants to direct a computing device to perform a number of similar tasks. For example, the user wishes to add a number of people to a list (e.g., a list of intended recipients of an e-mail). The user can simply add the people one by one, specifying a separate command to add each person. It would be more efficient for the user, however, if he could specify one command that adds all of the people to the list. For purposes of the present discussion, this one command is called a “multiple-goal” task.
Text interfaces are very common tools for directing a computing device to perform a task. Some text interfaces allow a user to specify a multiple-goal task. However, the user may have to correctly handle an intimidating amount of punctuation (e.g., parentheses) and operators to correctly specify the multiple-goal task.
Voice-search interfaces, which perform tasks by executing commands retrieved from task databases searched with voice queries, are becoming more common and are especially desirable when a user's hands or eyes are otherwise occupied and are therefore not available to manipulate a text interface. As just one example, voice-calling interfaces are most useful when the user is driving or when using a cellular telephone with a limited keypad. A voice-search interface gives the user more freedom to formulate his command by searching a task database by using a voice query. However, voice-search interfaces typically have some significant limitations in comparison with text interfaces, especially when presenting complicated tasks to a computing device. A user communicating through an existing voice interface would probably not be able to correctly specify a multiple-goal task at all, given the limitations of existing voice interfaces and the difficulty in correctly specifying an elaborately punctuated command without the benefit of visual feedback.